


A Momentary Lapse of Happily

by ordinarily (tofty)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-28
Updated: 2010-09-28
Packaged: 2017-10-15 09:49:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofty/pseuds/ordinarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lisa's changed her life.  It's not the first time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Momentary Lapse of Happily

**Author's Note:**

> A quick prequel to "Exile on Main Street."

They're unpacking in the new house. No one's talking, but she can hear Dean and Ben, tape stripping off boxes like bandages coming off half-healed scrapes, the thump of Ben's boots from overhead drumbeat-rhythmic as he moves to the cadence of his iPod. They're comforting noises, familiar, settling.

Moving is something Lisa feels is necessary every now and then. Some people rearrange the furniture in the living room or get a haircut, but her need for new requires real manual labor; she stays in a place too long and gets gaspy, has to move or she starts feeling locked down into life. Every time, she thinks, maybe this time I'll be ready to stop. And then it happens again -- she's never yet quite gotten there.

There are triggers, quotidian but unpredictable. Once, when Ben was two, she'd been looking for an old sweater in the back of her closet. Didn't find it, but what she found instead, a pair of old Docs, knee-high and clunky and lace-up, just the right size but didn't fit her any more at all, rendered her breathless, almost blind with terror, remembering herself at eighteen from five years (and a toddler) away. That was the first time, and there've been times since then. Sitting in a budget meeting. Cleaning up a shattered glass not long after Dean rescued Ben three years ago. She remembers every one, those times when she feels, suddenly and without warning, that she's deliberately suspended herself over life without a safety net, and out of nowhere she's got the urge to cut the ropes and just freefall, see where she lands.

The latest, that was Dean, obviously. She looked up one morning about three weeks after his arrival, too big for their little brown bungalow, so different from the Dean she remembered from before Ben, lithe and cocky and sweet, and even different from Dean of three years ago, beautiful and weathered and wary. He'd been standing immobile with his hands tucked under his armpits as though he were afraid to unfold, and she knew that whatever Dean needed wasn't going to be found in this place. She'd wanted a place for him to stretch out, sure, but also, also, looking at him there, transformed by grief, desperate and drowning right there in the middle of her living room, the thought occurred to her that this was going to kill them all if she didn't give them a little more space.

The house-hunting gave them something to work with, too, a way to get to know each other, negotiations and preferences. Lisa hadn't been expecting that, actually, didn't expect interest or opinions from Dean, who'd greeted with indifference her suggestion that they find a new place once the lease was up, but his itinerant life had prepared him for the ins and outs of house-hunting as well as monster-hunting, and he turned out to be interested in the ways the houses they looked at were put together. And when they saw the blue house, wide and low, and she saw Dean wandering through it as though he expected something from it, that decided her -- decided them both -- and here they are now. Dean's in the garage unpacking a whole bunch of new stuff she's never needed before, tools and huge bags of salt, gallons of water and boxes of rosaries. She's in the living room hooking up the television. Ben's in his bedroom. Three separate people in three separate places managing to work together. Who are somehow going to have to keep working together.

That's scary enough, almost, to trigger another sudden decision to uproot, but it feels less like a freefall, this time, which is weird and possibly self-destructive, considering that the guy now in her garage is paranoid, self-anesthetizing, in a freefall of his own. But self-destructive or not, Lisa relishes the coming weeks, new not just for Dean but for all of them, resetting the stage, falling but falling together.

**Author's Note:**

> Title's from a prose poem called "Don't Let Me Be Lonely (There Was a Time)" by Claudia Rankine.


End file.
